Dialogue of civilizations in a multipolar world: toward a multicivilizational­multiplex world order

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Petito, Fabio (2016) Dialogue of civilizations in a multipolar world: toward a multicivilizational-multiplex world order. International Studies Review, 18 (1). pp. 78-91. ISSN 1521-9488

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Dialogue of Civilizations in a Multipolar World: Towards a

Multicivilisational-Multiplex Word Order

FABIO PETITO

University of Sussex

In this article, I explore the relationship between the new multipolar trends related

to the emerging powers and the idea of dialogue of civilizations. My starting point

is to understand multipolarity as part of a broader epoch making process of

transformation of contemporary international society beyond its Western-centric

matrix. In the first part of this article, I therefore argue for an analytical

understanding that emphasizes the emergence of a new multipolar world of

civilizational politics and multiple modernities. In the second part of the article, I

reflect on how to counter the risk inherent in the potential antagonistic logic of

multipolarity by critically engaging the normative Huntingtonian construction of a

multicivilizational-multipolar world order. I argue that the link between dialogue

of civilizations and regionalism could represent a critical issue for the future of

global peace. In particular, multiculturally constituted processes of regional

integration are antidotes to the possible negative politicization of cultural

differences on a global scale and can contribute to the emergence of a new cross-

cultural jus gentium. These elements are critical to the construction of a realistic

dialogue of civilizations in international relations while preventing the risks

inherent in its growing multipolar configuration. They shape what, drawing on

Amitav Acharya’s work, could be named a multicivilizational-multiplex world

order.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Global IR and the Challenge of Dialogue of Civilizations: The Puzzle

The 2015 ISA annual convention thematized, with an unprecedented strength and scale for an

academic conference, the theoretical and political implications of the end of the Western-

centric matrix of international relations. Recognizing that there is no one-size-fits-all

approach to navigate this post-American multiplex world, Amitav Acharya, in his ISA

presidential address, outlined—under the heading of Global IR—an agenda for research that

compels us to better understand the diversity that exists in our world, as well as to seek new

common ground based on pluralistic universalism (Acharya 2014a). In this search, Global IR

faces the formidable methodological challenge of endorsing an analytical eclecticism that

transgresses “parsimonious and self-contained paradigms and research cultures” (Acharya

2016:10). In this spirit and, while acknowledging that there is no blueprint for the

construction of a peaceful and just world order, I want to explore how, in the contemporary

geopolitical context of new rising powers, the idea of dialogue of civilizations can contribute

for such a new common ground to emerge.

The idea of dialogue of civilizations emerged in the 1990s as a global political vision

(Petito 2007a) against the backdrop of two competing and powerful discourses, the “clash of

civilizations” (Huntington 1996) and the “globalization of liberalism/end of history”

(Fukuyama 1992). As I have argued elsewhere, this vision represents a powerful normative

challenge to the contemporary political orthodoxy implicit in the above political discourses

because it calls for the re-opening and re-discussion of the core Western-centric and liberal

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assumptions upon which the normative structure of contemporary international society is

based (Petito 2009). In other words, the key philosophical assumption behind the idea of

dialogue of civilizations represents a challenge to the Western-centric matrix of

contemporary practices and thinking in international relations and reflects what Amitai

Etzioni has convincingly highlighted:

both the end-of-history and the clash-of-civilizations arguments approach the non-

Western parts of the world as if they have little, if anything, to offer to the conception

of a good society—at least to its political and economic design—or to the evolving new

global architecture (2004:26).

More importantly to the economy of this paper, the idea of dialogue of civilizations in

international relations, from a geopolitical perspective, represents a radical critique of the

political and ideological dominance of a US-led liberal world. At the core of this vision one

finds a clear normative resistance against the idea of a unipolar world order, often

accompanied by the conviction that we are gradually, but ineluctably moving towards a

multipolar world. The question then arises as to whether the idea of dialogue of civilizations

should endorse the notion of a multipolar world order. This is a relevant question, since

polarity is clearly associated with a realist (and neo-realist) approach to international politics

and with a conceptualization of the international arena as a system of forces to be brought

into equilibrium (the stability of the system) by the well-known mechanism of the balance of

power (Mearsheimer 2001; Morgenthau 1948; Waltz 1979). The emphasis here is

overwhelmingly on material sources and great powers, the rest—the normative and non-state

dimensions which are at the heart of the vision of dialogue—being fundamentally irrelevant.

In this paper I explore the hypothesis that the empirical trend of the worldwide

decentralization of power away from what Huntington (1999) defined as the “lonely

superpower” towards other major, established and emerging, regional centers of power (the

EU, Japan, China, India, Russia, Brazil, South Africa and others) may well be more

conducive to the emergence of a more pluralistic and just world order. By dialectically

juxtaposing the analytical descriptions of a multipolar world with the metaphor of a multiplex

world (Acharya 2014b), I want to offer some thoughts on how the link between the growing

multipolar configuration of the international system and regionalism as political process

could represent a critical issue for the future of global peace, especially in the context of the

emerging new civilizational politics.

My main target here is not Huntington’s thesis of the clash of civilizations as analytical

framework but, rather, the Huntingtonian construction of a multicivilizational-multipolar

system as the normative solution that he proposes to prevent the danger of the clash. My

concern is that a multicivilizational-multipolar world order—and, in particular, an

unproblematic emphasis on (or even an enthusiasm for) multipolarity in the current

international context of civilizational politics—leaves us with a worrying system of forces, of

civilizational macro-regional great/rising powers, ready for collision; paradoxically, a

scenario not too dissimilar from the clash of civilizations. This is of a great topicality in an

international context, where multipolarity often seems to have become one of the key pillars

of the alternative vision of world order put forward by new rising powers like China and

Russia, as well as by a number of critical scholars such as Chantal Mouffe and Danilo Zolo,

who have recently focused on the idea of a balance of regional spaces and argued in favor of

a multipolar world order to oppose the American imperial project.

I argue here that, without a process of dialogue of civilizations at different levels, as an

overarching framework of reference, there is a risk that this multipolar vision would end up

looking very much like the model of multicivilizational-multipolar order put forward by

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Huntington as the antidote to what he saw as the greatest threat to world peace—the clashes

of civilizations. This is an important point, as this part of Huntington’s argument—absent in

his original 1993 Foreign Affairs’ article—has largely gone unnoticed (the reason also being

that it is sketched in the last few pages of a book of more than 300 pages—an unbalance

which arguably confirms the impression that the book is really about the clash rather than

about how to avoid it). To counter this risk inherent in the potential antagonistic logic of

multipolarity, I put forward an argument for multiculturally constituted processes of regional

integration as antidotes to the possible negative politicization of cultural differences on a

global scale. Drawing on Amitav Acharya’s work, and in order to distinguish it from the

Huntingtonian version, I call this perspective a multicivilisational-multiplex word order. But

before critically discussing the Huntingtonian risks of a multicivilizational-multipolar world

order, some preliminary remarks on the very notion of multipolarity in the current context of

civilizational politics are in place.

The Alignment between Multipolarity, Civilizational Politics and Multiple Modernities:

Beyond the Western-centric Matrix of the International Society

Multipolarity and the Demise of the Liberal International Order

A widespread debate has been ranging throughout the post-Cold War period on whether the

end of the bipolar international system would lead to uni- or multipolarity (Krauthammer

2002/2003; Layne 1993; Wohlforth 1999). While there have been different positions on the

nature of the post-89 international system in terms of the distribution of power, it is fair to say

that the view that we are living in a “unipolar era” is today less popular than it was in the

early 1990s and predictions that the twenty-first century will see the emergence of a post-

American word are increasingly common (Mahbubani 2008; Mead 2014; Zakaria 2008). This

view is arguably the result of certain critical security and political developments of the last

fifteen years, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, it is also based on less

contingent medium-/long-term economic estimations which suggest the fast progression of

the (relative) economic decline of the US in favor of the new Asian fast-growing economies

of China and India—a reality that has become more visible after the 2008 financial crisis with

the recent global economic recession, whose origins were in the American heartland of the

West (OECD 2014; UNDP 2013). Unsurprisingly, in a public non-academic way, the term

multipolarity is increasingly used to point to the growing number and roles of major

emerging regional centres of powers (China, India, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia,

etc…), which have now also begun to be recognized in institutions of global governance like

the G-20 and the BRICS.

Only recently, academic discussion has moved to the issue of whether the end of

unipolarity will also represent a challenge to the international liberal world order designed

and supported by the US after WWII. John Ikenberry (2011) has been forcefully arguing that

the new emerging powers are not going to challenge the rules of this international liberal

order, in which they have become highly integrated and thanks to which they have gained

their renewed great power status. Today’s “illiberal” powers, the integrationists’ argument

continues, are not revisionist powers of the liberal rules and institutions of world order, for

they do not have an alternative visions of order and tend mostly to behave as free riders

(Ikenberry 2014; Lieber 2014). Opposing this argument, Martin Jacques (2012) has argued

that, as China becomes the new (economic) hegemon of the twenty-first-century international

system, it will seek to shape a Chinese-led world order with Chinese political and cultural

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characteristics, with a result that is likely to be similar to the hegemonic impact that the US

had in the last century on world order.

Exploring an intermediary position which remains sensitive to non-Western theoretical

and political perspectives, Peter Katzenstein (2012a: xiv) has argued that, since “international

liberalism is not sufficiently capacious to encompass the full normative reach of the emerging

world order”, we need to focus on the multiple processes of Sinicization or Indianization

which are contributing to the redefinition of the current world order. Amitav Acharya

(2014b:78), similarly, has argued that the new rising powers will also significantly affect the

future world order in terms of norm-making and on the basis of their respective cultural

traditions and approaches to sovereignty, security and development.

Following their lead, I want to suggest that, while on-going changes in the material

structure of the international system have now become, in some way, part of the mainstream

discussion of the transformation of contemporary international relations, what has not been

given the attention it deserves is how the changing distribution of capabilities in the

international system is also taking place as part of the broader epoch-making process of

transformation of contemporary international society beyond its modern and Western-centric

matrix. In other words, the much more recognized structural-material changes of the

economic and power shift towards the East and BRICS—now also institutionalized in the

form of intra-BRICS cooperation (Stuenkel 2015)—have to be understood within the context

of the transformation of the ideational/ideological structure of international society. This

transformation is occurring simultaneously and is, firstly, visible in the global resurgence of

cultural and religious pluralism in the quest for authenticity of the non-Western worlds

(Petito and Hatzopoulos 2003; Thomas 2005). These forces have been shaping local,

national, regional and global politics through what, I want to argue, can be described, in a

qualified way, as a new form of civilizational politics.

A New Civilizational Politics: Civilizations as Strategic Frames of Reference of Post-89

International Politics

My argument is that a specific structural-ideational change of the international system has

further intensified with the end of the Cold War: the reassertion, as Jóhann Árnason (2003)

has posited (and, in this regard, Huntington’s argument retains part of its validity), of

civilisations, defined in a fundamentally culturalist-religious sense, as strategic frames of

reference, not as direct protagonists, of international politics.1 This ideational development is,

in a sense, a typical post-Cold War fact. As he has pointed out, in fact, “civilizational claims

and references now play a more important role in the global ideological context then they did

when the rival universalisms of the Cold War era dominated the scene” (Árnason 2003:6). It

is also, however, the result of what could be termed as the cultural turn of the post-colonial

world—that is, part of a longer-term process of challenge to Western dominance, intensified

from WWII, and which Hedley Bull (1984) calls the “revolt against the West”. Following the

struggle against the political imperialism of the West (decolonization) and its economic

imperialism (the Third-World call for a New International Economic Order), the post-

colonial world, disenchanted by the economic and democratic failures of the European

ideologies like nationalism and socialism, incarnated by elites very often trained in European

capitals, turned to a fight against the cultural neo-imperialism of the West in search for

cultural authenticity. The political slogans were now calling for the indigenization of

modernity, the most politically visible examples of which were the 1979 Islamic Revolution

1 This understanding of civilization has perhaps its most well-known articulation in Max Weber’s analysis of the

religious preconditions for the West in The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism (1968).

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in Iran and the worldwide emergence of political Islam. Other examples were the new

cultural assertiveness of Asian countries in the name of so-called “Asian values” and Hindu

nationalism; more recently, the growing role of Orthodoxy in the Russian state seems to

suggest that the world is still living through this process of cultural revolt against the West.

This latter process arguably intensified when the end of the Cold War implied the political

inevitability of a common (political, economic and social) liberal and Western model for the

entire planet. Often, in this context, the great worldwide religious traditions have become the

major voices of radical critique of the globalization of a Western-centric and liberal order. In

the powerful words of Régis Debray, the once-Marxist revolutionary and friend of Che

Guevara, “Religion turns out after all not to be the opium of the people, but the vitamin of the

weak” (2008:35). It becomes one of the key vectors of political resistance and struggle in the

name of the social ethics and arguments which resonate in the everyday life of what Jean

Bethke Elshtain (1999) has provocatively labelled “really existing community”. This is why

the post-colonial cultural turn is, in my view, also a post-secular one or, as Ashis Nandy has

noted, implies the return of the sacred (Nandy 2007; Petito and Mavelli 2014). This historical

process, it seems to me, contributes to the new centrality of civilizational politics in the post-

Cold War era. In this regard, Samuel Huntington’s argument retains part of its validity—in

the words of Peter Katzenstein (2012a:xv) “He alerted us to the fact that, with the end of the

Cold War, the cultural context of international relations had undergone a fundamental

change”.

This new civilizational politics is, in other words, the predominant ideological context in

which the emerging multipolarity is taking shape. Civilizational politics is neither new nor

unchanging. However, contemporary civilizational politics seems to have very clear

culturalist/religious connotations which were less relevant, for example, during the Cold War,

where civilizational politics was defined in a fundamentally political way: on the one hand,

the West committed to liberalism, individualism and free market capitalism and, on the other,

the East committed to socialism, collectivism and state-planned economy. It is enough to

think of the political transformation that the civilizational notion of the West has gone

through from the post-WWII community of the Free World—which included, for example,

Japan and Turkey—to the more culturalist-religious notion of a Judeo-Christian West which,

in the post-89 context, makes it much more difficult to refer to Japan and Turkey as part of

the West, even if the old strategic and security considerations might still prevail.

Of course, other conceptualizations of civilizations are possible and, therefore, different

kinds of civilizational politics can be imagined. For example, we can think of civilizations as

material cultures (civilizations matérielles), as Fernand Braudel (1982) did with the

Mediterranean region, turning on its head the historical image of this sea as a civilizational-

religious fault line—which is still at the base of Huntington’s thesis. As a result, civilizations,

defined as material cultures, could become strategic frames of reference for a different

civilizational politics of regional integration, as was attempted—modestly and not without

contradictions—in post-89 Mediterranean-centered regional political initiatives such as the

Euro-Mediterranean Partnership or the more recent Union for the Mediterranean (Adler,

Crawford, Bicchi, and Del Sarto 2006; Petito and Brighi 2010).

Civilizational Analysis and Multiple Modernities in IR

To argue that civilizations have become relevant strategic frames of reference for

international politics is to introduce a dimension of political construction which is

incompatible with an understanding of civilizations à la Huntington as primarily enclosed,

static and monolithic actors with dispositional characteristics (1996); it does not imply,

however, that civilizations are imagined communities or invented traditions which need to be

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understood as boundary-demarcating discursive practices (Jackson 2007). These two

diametrically opposed understandings of civilizations in International Relations—

dispositional and discursive (Jackson 2010)—paradoxically converge on the assumption that

civilization-based thinking is necessarily a conflict-generating factor and therefore equates

the question of civilizational politics from the beginning with the inescapable antagonistic

logic of the clash (see also Bilgin 2012), an argument which I have tried to challenge

elsewhere (Petito 2011).

Drawing on pioneering research by Katzenstein, who has put the new sociological

scholarship known as civilizational analysis (Eisenstadt 2000) in dialogue with IR in his

trilogy devoted to the issue of civilizations in world politics (Katzenstein 2010, 2012a,

2012b; see also Bettiza 2014 for the first comprehensive review of this IR literature), I

maintain that civilizations can be understood as “loosely coupled, internally differentiated,

elite-centred social systems that are integrated into a global context” (Katzenstein 2010:5).

Furthermore, new multi-disciplinary research (Hobson 2004 & 2010; Ling 2002; see also

Nelson 1973 for a pioneer argument in this vein) shows that civilizational complexes,

constellations, configurations or patterns—as some of these theorists rightly prefer to

describe the phenomenon to indicate its complexity and dynamisms—are arguably

constituted in a much more prominent way than previously thought by inter-civilizational

encounters and mutually constitutive transcivilizational relations. This sociological

understanding of civilizations, as Katzenstein has shown, is compatible with a political

analysis of civilizations as social construction of primordiality, rather than dispositional or

discoursive because, as I have tried to indicate, “it is not the category but the act of reification

or construction that is politically consequential and that required political analysis”

(Katzenstein 2010:12).

This pluralist (and dialogical!) theoretical perspective is important for the argument

developed in this article because it opens up the possibility of understanding another critical

dimension of the epoch-making process of transformation of contemporary international

society beyond the Western-centric matrix: the emergence of multiple modernities out of the

failure of the Eurocentric theory and practice of modernization (Árnason 2003; Eisenstadt

2003), arguably one of the strongest rationale for advancing a Global IR research agenda.

Whether it is the issue of democracy, development, human rights or secularism, just to

mention a few important instances of institutional arrangements to have emerged out of what

Eisenstadt has called the single and encompassing civilization of modernity (2001), it is

becoming increasingly theoretically clear and politically visible that the merging of “modern”

political values and practices with traditional local cultural references and ways of living will

be the rule rather than the exception in a post-Western world. Discussing Eisenstadt’s theory of

multiple modernities, Katzenstein has effectively pointed out that “Modern societies are

therefore not converging on a common path involving capitalist industrialism, political

democracy, modern welfare regimes, and pluralizing secularism. Instead, the different religious

traditions act as cultural sources for the enactment of different programmes of modernity”

(2010:17). Hence, it is no surprise that the instances of “modern” institutional arrangements

which I mentioned above—democracy, development, human rights or secularism—are

increasingly hyphenated or discussed in conjunction with Islam, Confucianism, Hinduism,

Buddhism, Taoism and other traditions.

To sum up, I have argued that today’s international society is experiencing an epoch-

making process of transformation beyond its liberal and Western-centric matrix. Three

interlocked developments—multipolarity, civilizational politics and multiple modernities—are

critical to this transformation. In other words, we are seeing what I would call an alignment

between the emergence of a new multipolar world, civilizations as strategic frames of reference

for international politics and programs of multiple modernities. This alignment—a new

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multipolar world in a context of civilizational politics and multiple modernities—requires

much more analytical study.

Unquestionably the Huntingtonian analysis did capture some important trends of the

current epoch-making transformation of contemporary international society. The emerging

architecture of the international system, however, could be more like—to use Acharya’s

(2014b) effective metaphor—a multiplex world: multiplex in its worldviews, in its array of

relevant states, its inter-governmental and non-state actors and its complex dimensions of

interdependence at local, national, regional and supra-national levels. As he has rightly

pointed out—and this should work as a double note of caution when using the concept of

multipolarity—first, “The emerging powers by themselves neither represent nor exhaust the

possibility of an alternative, or post-hegemonic, global governance structure” (2014b:3) and,

second, “The tendency to conceptualise the emerging world order in terms of European

history [read: multipolar concert] is wrong-headed” (2014a:653). In terms of the bigger

picture (and bracketing many of the complexities that any discussion on world order is

doomed to fail), for Acharya a multiplex world order might be a hybrid between a concert

and a regional world order model (2014b:113). For such a model to emerge and contribute to

a more peaceful and just future, however, I argue that the combination of dialogue of

civilizations and regionalism are essential. In order to show that, I now turn to the under

examined Huntingtonian normative vision of a multicivilizational-multipolar world order and

reflect on how and under which conditions this new emerging post-Western international

system could be more conducive to a pluralistic and just world order or what I call a

multicivilizational-multiplex world order.

A Critique of the Huntingtonian Multicivilizational-Multipolar Model of World Order:

Building Bridges not Walls

The popularity of Huntington’s thesis no doubt has to do with framing post-89 international

politics as a multicultural fact. In his 1996 book, Huntington argues that the only way to

avoid the clash of civilizations is to envisage a multicivilizational-multipolar order organized

around what he calls “the core states of civilizations [which would be the] sources of order

within civilizations and, through negotiations with other core states, between civilizations”

(1996:156). He then adds that “a world in which core states play a leading or dominating role

is a sphere-of-influence world” and that “a core state can perform its ordering function

because member states perceive it as cultural kin” (1996:156). On the one hand, his proposal

of multicivilizational-multipolar order is, indeed, an acknowledgment of the centrality of the

growing multicultural nature of international society. On the other, the problem with such a

model of order is that it is constructed only on the grounds of a material structure of power,

which might well represent the material/geopolitical structure of the global order but does not

make for the normative/ideational structure of such an order. It is true that Huntington

sketches very briefly (in less than a page) three rules for a possible normative structure of his

multicivilizational-multipolar order: the abstention rule (core states should abstain from

intervention in conflicts in other civilizations), the joint mediation rule (core states should

negotiate to contain or halt fault-line wars among states or groups from their civilizations)

and, finally, the commonalities rule (peoples in all civilizations should search for and attempt

to expand the values, institutions and practices they have in common with peoples of other

civilizations) (1996:316, 320). These rules, however, reveal even more neatly the realist

assumptions of the model as they, in essence, amount to nothing but a minimalist ethics of

non-interference—the commonalities rule pointing, perhaps, to some “thin” minimal

communal denominator of universal morality but, in fact, being a perfect exemplification of

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that rhetorical technique which consists in vaguely referring to some kind of undefined

normative necessity of an opposite aspiration to the clash. The result of the Huntingtonian

construction is, therefore, a worrying system of forces, of civilizational macro-regional great

powers ready for collision—the clash of civilizations—and the only possible hope is to make

the stability of the system attainable through the mechanisms of the balance of power.

However, the realist emphasis, shared by Huntington, on the centrality of fear, insecurity and

threats in an anarchic environment, seems simply to make the clash of civilizations

unavoidable—as merely a matter of time.

Paradoxically, at first sight, such a framework seems strikingly similar to the arguments

advanced by two European critical scholars—Chantal Mouffe (2007) and Danilo Zolo

(2007)—in the context of their critique of the American unipolar project, the idea being the

construction of a multipolar planetary balance of power around macro-regions defined along

civilizational lines. Mouffe has argued that the central problem which the current unipolar

world, under the unchallenged hegemony of the United States, is facing is the impossibility

for antagonisms to find legitimate forms of expression. Under such conditions, antagonisms,

when they do emerge, tend to take extreme forms. In order to create channels for the

legitimate expression of dissent, we need to envisage, Mouffe suggests, a pluralistic

multipolar world order constructed around a certain number of regional blocs and genuine

cultural poles. Along similar lines, Zolo argues that, to confront the United States’ dangerous

imperial tendencies, “the project of a peaceful world needs a neo-regionalist revival of the

idea of Großraum [greater space]” (2007:160). These arguments for a multipolar,

multicivilisational world order, however, require a degree of caution for, as Zolo has

correctly sensed, “before this kind of order can be achieved complex economic,

technological, cultural and religious conditions must be met that make a dialogue between the

world’s major civilizations possible” (2007:162).

Zolo correctly cautions about the apparent self-evident force of this multipolar model and

points to the necessity of immersing it in a broader and real process of dialogue between the

world’s major civilizations. In the present international situation of growing cultural and

religious misunderstanding and mistrust, which prompted Edward Saïd (2001), in the

aftermath of 9/11, to speak of the real danger of a clash of ignorance, the conditions should

be created for widespread processes of “inter-civilizational mutual understanding” at multiple

levels. In this respect, the link between civilizational dialogue, mutual understanding and

peace is fortunately becoming more widely acknowledged. I want to argue here that the ideal

of “building bridges of mutual understanding” in order to learn (or re-learn) how to live

together within different cultural communities—what Andrea Riccardi has called, in his

(2006) book, the art of “con-vivere”—is, in fact, also critical in a more specific sense: it

provides the key antidote to the potential antagonistic logic of multipolarity. To explain this

point, I want to return for a moment to the Huntingtonian model of multicivilizational-

multipolar order discussed above.

As I have argued, the Huntingtonian vision of a multicivilizational-multipolar order moves

from the recognition of the growing multicultural nature of international society but, and

herein lies the problem, his proposal is based on the opposite logic of the dialogical politics

of multiculturalism that needs to be strengthened. In Huntington’s view, the multicultural

nature of the world has, on the one hand, to be almost confined, internationally, within a

civilizational cage, following the “good-fences-make-good-neighbours” principle and, on the

other, has to be contrasted, domestically, through strict immigration policy and a new

integrationist approach. Therefore, in his follow-up book to the Clash of Civilizations,

Huntington has unsurprisingly argued against the growing presence of Latinos in the United

States because of its supposedly weakening effect on American Anglo-Protestant culture and

national identity (2004). In sum, his argument is not about building inter-civilizational

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bridges of mutual understanding but, rather, about building walls of containment and

separation, something that in the long term would inevitably reinforce the antagonistic logics

of multipolarity along civilizational/great powers lines.

The Global Multiculturalism of Dialogue of Civilizations: From New Regionalisms to a

New Cross-Cultural Jus Gentium

The idea of dialogue of civilizations envisages “bridges” not “walls”. In particular, new

forms of regionalism could represent critical vectors in building cross-cultural bridges and

giving shape to a world order inspired by the global multiculturalism of dialogue of

civilizations. The emphasis here is not on the geographical-territorial dimension of

civilizations but, rather, on the normative one—that is, on civilizations as the great cultural

and religious social traditions of the world. This implies, for example, that the neoregionalist

revival that Zolo and Mouffe favour as a way of constructing a multipolar spatial ordering

does not need to take shape along civilizational-culturalist lines. Rather it cannot be

dismembered from reinforcing a dialogical politics of multiculturalism “at home and

abroad”.2 A case in point of contemporary relevance to European regional integration and the

relationship between Europe and the Muslim world could be the framing of Turkey’s EU

accession strategy as a “bridge” between Asia and Europe or as a new “alliance of

civilizations” (Ardiç 2014; Bilgin and Bilgiç 2011). My argument is, in fact, that

multiculturally constituted processes of regional integration are more conducive to a peaceful

global order, as they act as a preventive antidote to the possible negative politicization of

civilizational differences on a global scale.

A similar point can be made to support the creation ex novo of multicultural forms of

regional cooperation and integration which are, in any case, arguably justifiable on

functionalist grounds in response to the common challenges brought about by the processes

of globalization. Initiatives of regionalization involving, for example, member-states from a

plurality of existing regional political organizations can further contribute to the dilution of

the risks of a multipolarization along enclosed civilizational lines.This is coherent with new

trends in regionalism, such as open- and inter-regionalism, and could represent the basis for a

truly decentralized and multilateral structure of global governance. In this context, however,

the system of global governance, to borrow an effective image from Zolo, should operate a

transition “from the logic of the Leviathan to that of the thousand fragile chains of Lilliput”

(1997:154).

For example, from such a perspective, the already-mentioned initiatives of Mediterranean

regionalization involving European and Arab countries are to be encouraged as a way of

fostering bridges of communication and mutual understanding between the European Union

and the Arab League; they can also constitute laboratories for the praxis of intercivilizational

dialogue. Finally, this form of multiculturalism “abroad” is likely to facilitate “living

together” at home and vice versa, a fact that cannot be overlooked in our era of global

communication. Even in the extremely difficult and tragic contemporary context, I would

continue to anticipate in the long term a reciprocally beneficial relationship between the

integration of the growing Muslim presence in Europe—arguably one of the greatest

challenges facing the future identity of Europe—and a peaceful relationship between Europe

and the Muslim world in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

2 “At home and abroad" stands for “domestically and internationally” and is an expression taken from the

title of Michael Walzer’s (1994) book.

10

As Acharya (2014b) has rightly argued, “The proliferation of regional institutions, their

expanding functions covering both traditional and transnational issues, and the growing

incidence of inter-regionalism, may introduce a healthy diversity and leadership into the

emerging world order” (2014b:113). This new forms of regionalism, while giving

institutional shape to an important layer of post-national global governance, avoid the

reproduction of enclosed regional blocks—either along civilizational or trading

block/regional hegemonic lines—because of their open and globally interconnected nature.

This consideration, however, needs to be qualified when the normative–legal dimension

of these processes of regionalism is brought into focus. The question is that a new

regionalization of the world along these lines might also contribute to a more pluralistic way

of conceiving international law informed by non-Western legal conceptions—one more

manifestation of multiple modernities. This is the vision on which Danilo Zolo has founded

the research program with the very indicative name of Jura Gentium, which assumes a

pluralist approach to international law opposing both the traditional ethnocentrism of Western

legal science and globalism/cosmopolitan normativism (Jura Gentium 2002).

The point here is that the pluralization of regional legal systems and the emergence of

regionally based understanding of international law could arguably reinforce the antagonistic

logics of mutipolarity. Interestingly, in the aftermath of the last waves of decolonization,

Hedley Bull was already arguing that the emergence of a “multicultural international society”

imperatively requires a new normative structure, since “we have… to recognise that the

nascent cosmopolitan culture of today, like the international society which it helps to sustain,

is weighted in favour of the dominant cultures of the West” (1977:305). The political

discourse of dialogue of civilizations, by calling for the reopening and re-defining of the core

Western-centric and liberal assumptions upon which the normative structure of contemporary

international society is based, provides a conceptual and political framework within which to

answer to this momentous challenge.

In other words, the growing multicultural nature of contemporary international society—

emerging as part of a growing worldwide demand for cultural recognition—needs what can

be referred to as a form of “global multiculturalism”.3 However, the form of multiculturalism

that we need on a global scale should not be based on a postmodern form of subjectivism or a

form of radical cultural relativism but needs to be accompanied by a commitment to an active

politics of dialogue of civilizations: primarily a dialogue among the great cultural and

religious social traditions of the world. More specifically, what is needed is a politics based

on a “presumption of worth” and shaped by a Gadamerian dialogical model as fusion of

horizons, as has been persuasively argued with the reference to the domestic debate on

multiculturalism by Charles Taylor (1994) and Bhikhu Parekh (2000) (see also Dallmayr

2002 and Petito 2011).

My argument is that global multiculturalism and dialogue of civilizations are conceptually

interlinked and must be conceived in a mutually constitutive relationship. Just as Parekh has

argued, from the perspective of his domestic theory of multiculturalism, that “the good

[multiculturally constituted] society does not commit itself to a particular political

doctrine…[but] its constant concern is to keep the dialogue going and nurture a climate in

which it can proceed effectively, stretch boundaries of the prevailing forms of thought, and

generate a body of collective acceptable principles, institutions and politicise” (2000:340), I,

too, would contend that a commitment to an active politics of dialogue of civilizations—that

is, a willingness practically to give life to this intercivilizational dialogical encounter—is

necessary for the emergence of this new normative structure in the form of what could be

3 Here I am using the distinction used by Bhikhu Parekh (2000) between “multicultural”, which refers to

the fact of cultural diversity, and the term “multiculturalism”, which refers to a normative response to that fact.

11

called a new cross-cultural jus gentium (Dallmayr 2004). Here, the interplay of the Latin legal

terminology captures in a synthetic manner the challenge—the need to move from the old

Westphalian jus gentium, to a new, post-Westphalian, cross-cultural jus gentium by

integrating, in some sort of unity in diversity, the plurality of the emerging jura gentium. To

this political enterprise, the intellectual work of political and IR theorists engaged in

comparative political theory and non-Western forms of theorising is likely to be of great

future political relevance (see, for example, Dallmayr 2010; Godrej 2011; Ling 2014). The

Global IR research agenda provides an important opening for these developments.

The Multicivilizational-Multiplex World Order of Dialogue of Civilizations in

International Relations

Today, dialogue of civilizations is at the very heart of such creative efforts to imagine an

alternative conceptualization of a world order beyond its Western-centric matrix. To give

shape to a peaceful and just order out of the emerging alignment between multipolarity,

civilizational politics and multiple modernities is no doubt an epoch-making challenge, for

which there is no blueprint. My argument is that an alternative model of world order inspired

by this dialogue of civilizations can, indeed, have multipolarity as its spatial/geopolitical

orientation but on the condition that a global politics of dialogical multiculturalism flourishes

as a way of mitigating the risk of a “culturalist enclosure” in this former model and to

dialogically inscribe plurality at its normative center. Concretely, this neo-regionalist,

multipolar and cross-cultural model of world order would be different from the

Huntingtonian model of multicivilizational-multipolar order as: (i) it is not shaped along

civilizational-culturalist lines but by a dialogical multiculturalism, (ii) it is based on new

forms of cross-cultural regionalism and the negotiation of a new cross-cultural jus gentium

and (iii) it is committed to a widespread process of “intercivilizational mutual understanding”

at multiple levels.

This international architecture closely resembles the multiplex world order envisaged by

Acharya as a hybrid between a concert and a regional world order model (2014b:113). This is

why I have used the multicivilizational-multiplex label to describe it. It remains to be seen,

however, where the future of world order and global governance will tend to predominantly

gravitate along the continuum between a concert sphere-of-influence world of great powers

and a post- and trans-national regional world of global governance. Unsurprisingly the

current international predicament has been paving the way for a new scholarly interest on the

notion of spheres of influence beyond what Susanna Hast has aptly called, in a recent

excellent book on the topic, its Cold War pejorative connotation that is preventing us to see

that its normative core may still be very much relevant for the future of world order (2014).

Given the growing activism of emerging powers, especially at a regional level, I indeed

concur with Etzioni that viewing international order through the prism of spheres of influence

can provides unique insights into the twenty century challenges and world order

configurations (2015:117).

Here again, it seems to me, that the Global IR orientation is promising. By rediscovering

the forgotten histories of comparative international systems and word orders as a source of

theorising (Acharya 2014a:652), we might find out, for example, that, first, the relationship

between spheres of influence and regional cooperation does not need to be understood as the

given-for-granted Westphalian and Eurocentric knowledge on international relations would

have it; and second, that a different, “non-Western” rooted conceptualization, can better

capture some of the epoch-making transformations of contemporary international society.

This process of de-Westernization of the IR canon is already in itself a form of cross-cultural

12

dialogue and, as Ashis Nandy has interestingly argued with reference to the idea of dialogue

of civilizations, such an opening also call for a re-engagement with the disowned or repressed

traditions that make up the European experience for “any alternative form of dialogue

between cultures cannot but attempt to rediscover the subjugated West and make it an ally”

(1998:146).

Such an outline of an alternative model of world order and global governance is, of course,

still very general. Many other contextual conditions and considerations would need to be

brought into the discussion to provide a more developed model responding to twenty century

international predicament. Here is not the place to deepen such a discussion. However,

perhaps as a way of concluding, I would like to point to the need, today, for new heterodox

alliances to support such an international political theory of world order: the promotion of

common initiatives (cultural, social, communicative and political) to build new transversal

practices of solidarity, cooperation and mobilization, involving groups from different cultural

backgrounds, civilizational locations and religious affiliations acting together on the basis of

common political aspirations and beyond the limited anti-hegemonic logic of the rising

powers. This practice of cross-cultural dialogue carries the hope that we may learn how to

live together in our increasingly multicultural and globalized international society. The

political articulation of the idea of a dialogue of civilizations that I have sketched here is

offered in the hope that it might contribute to this more peaceful and just future world order

to come.

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